It is well established that women have a reproductive “biological clock”, in that egg quality and quantity decreases with advancing age. One method to attempt to overcome the age-related decline in fertility is to preserve oocytes for future use, known as oocyte cryopreservation. When this is done for non-medical reasons, it is referred to as social oocyte cryopreservation.
Although there are currently accepted visual classification systems to grade or evaluate sperm, such as WHO Classification 2010, and embryos, there is no established oocyte classification system that is clinically validated or utilized. Although there are morphological features of an oocyte that can be visualized by light microscopy that have been associated with lower reproductive potential, there is yet to be an integrated classification that can incorporate these features into a validated diagnostic tool. In essence, an egg scoring system or an accurate predictive model is lacking in the field of reproductive medicine.
In patients that undergo oocyte cryopreservation, there is no validated tool that can accurately predict the potential outcomes of each oocyte. Predicting the reproductive outcomes of oocytes is currently performed using historical data based on generally two clinical parameters—the patients age at the time of egg freezing and the total number mature oocytes frozen. This approach (historical data based on age and the number of mature oocytes) is unable provide a genuinely qualitative metric, a scoring method, or criteria for determining likelihood of success for a particular oocyte. No individual oocyte assessment is taken into consideration, so prediction is based on historical data (e.g., twelve eggs in a thirty-three year old patient) instead of personalized data (e.g., assessing the potential of each particular egg). Therefore, there is a need for a visual (non-invasive) oocyte classification system that provides accuracy and serves as tool for embryologists to aid patients in making more sophisticated fertility related decision.